6. Exploring Indian Spirituality

When I finished my PhD in 1975, I went to India out of curiosity about Indian spirituality. I saw an advertisement from the British Council for a lecturer position at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India and decided to apply. I was accepted and began teaching biochemistry to PhD students. At the same time, I was deeply involved in spirituality, reading many spiritual texts and spending time with sadhus by the Ganges, having spontaneous spiritual experiences.
Before India, my experiences were mostly limited to yoga and reading spiritual texts by authors like Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley. I didn't have a deep meditative practice, but I was always drawn to spiritual-minded people.
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My year in Varanasi was steeped in spiritual experiences, but in a very informal way. I felt like an anthropologist, observing Sadhus and sometimes joining them for ceremonies, including smoking and chanting. Every morning, I would jump into the Ganges and swim, despite warnings about its dangers. I tried local remedies, like drinking palm juice from tapped palm trees, which acted as a powerful digestive cleanse. The spirituality in India was seamlessly integrated into everyday life, with tantric ceremonies on the Ganges' banks seen as ordinary. I had profound moments, like spending three days and nights without sleep, listening to Indian music and chanting, and encountering freshwater dolphins after praying for a miracle. These experiences confirmed the possibility of living a life where the spiritual and ordinary coexist. Eventually, I decided to deepen my practice by attending a Goenka retreat in 1976, moving from being an observer to actively engaging in spiritual practice.
It was quite a lot of ceremonies and experience with Sadhus, sitting around a fire, smoking with them-or not. Sometimes they were smoking, and I wasn't because I didn't want to be intoxicated all the time; it was too much. We would chant and shout, you know, just to have the experience of being ecstatic. So, yeah, I did take part in some of the ceremonies with the Sadhus, but I didn't live with them. That was too far away for me. I was still teaching at the university, so I couldn't totally let go. I had to stay connected to my university world, but I could also let go a bit. I couldn't live with the Sadhus; I had to live a little bit differently.
I was teaching PhD students, but often I'd take them out to the Ganges and tell them to stop reading those stupid biochemistry texts and come out to the Ganges and live. These young Indians didn't know anything about this; they had no knowledge of what was going on. To them, the different and diverse people by the Ganges were just crazy, and they didn't want anything to do with sitting on the banks.